Diversity Foundation Inc.
About Us
(The Diversity Foundation of Minnesota) DF is a Non-Profit "All Volunteer" organization primarily serving Native (Dakota) Reservations across the Great Plains, with dedicated efforts to "Right Historic Wrongs", making amends for US Govt's many historic Injustices & Intergenerational Trauma, suffered by our Original Dakota People, who for millennia had lived & called Southern Minn. their "Ancestral Homeland" until 1851, when US Government's unscrupulous treaties, forced the Dakota to small SW Minn. prison camps (aka reservations) where further broken promises & starvation led to aftermath of the 1862 US-Dakota War, Mankato's Execution of "38 Dakota Warriors", with 1700 prisoners held outside over winter at Fort Snelling POW, until spring 1863, when US soldiers herded 1300 Dakota survivors onto overcrowded boats & exiled to SD's Crow Creek POW & other destitute locations, where majority Dakota descendants continue to struggle under "near 3rd World" living conditions yet today. (See "Crow Creek the Forgotten People")
Since 1995, Diversity Foundation (DF) volunteers have been filming & documenting well over 800 Video hours Native American elders, sharing their publicly "untold" stories & little known chapters of American history. DF has also helped facilitate, film & photograph numerous Euro-Native American Reconciliation events across Southern Minnesota (ie Mankato, Winona, Rochester, Twin Cities, Wabasha, Pipestone etc) along with filming elders & events at majority Dakota/Lakota Indian Reservations across Great Plains & Canadian Dakota Reserves. One of DF's goals is raise funding to hire qualified media technicians & editors to help DF digitize, edit & transform these "Living History" Video recordings & over 60,000 photos, producing a series of historic/educational documentaries for a wide variety of Native & non-Native audiences (ie schools, colleges, families, media & history centers, broadcast educational documentaries etc )